Home Menu

Search

Search this site:

LM Montgomery Conference 2012

THANKS FOR A GREAT TIME, EVERYONE! WE LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU IN 2014!

TO HELP US MAKE THINGS EVEN BETTER NEXT TIME, PLEASE COMPLETE THE EVALUATION FORM, IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY (FORMS CAN BE FAXED, ATTN: SIMON LLOYD, TO 902-628-4305, OR MAILED TO: THE LM MONTGOMERY INSTITUTE, c/o UPEI ROBERTSON LIBRARY, 550 UNIVERSITY AVE., CHARLOTTETOWN, C1A 4P3); YOU CAN ALSO E-MAIL FEEDBACK DIRECTLY TO THE CONFERENCE CO-CHAIRS.

The 10th biennial offering of the Institute's International Conference, LM Montgomery and Cultural Memory, starts this Wednesday, June 20th, and runs through to Sunday, June 24th.

The Conference team acknowledges, with deep appreciation, the work of the just-announced Friends of the LM Montgomery Institute. We will be cooperating closely with the Friends to support their inaugural fundraising event, a Silent Auction, taking place during Conference 2012. Please click here to learn more about the Auction, the Friends, and their future plans.

2. Program
Click on the links in the Menu bar at left to see the Conference Program (note that program details are subject to change). You will receive a print Program at the Conference Registration Desk.

3. Workshops and Social Events
We are excited to be offering two excellent pre-Conference workshops this year, each led by a talented and popular figure in the Montgomery field: Trinna Frever will offer a session on Story, Identity, Cultural Memory: Oral Storytelling in the Literature Classroom, while Deirdre Kessler will lead a life-writing workshop entitled Once Upon a Space: Memory and Place.
You have the option of registering for either the Frever or Kessler workshop individually (each workshop costs $40), or you can receive a special discount rate by registering for both workshops jointly.

In addition to the workshops, we are also offering an exciting line-up of social events: some of these are included with Registration (regular or student), but two require separate registration.

On the evening of Friday, June 22, we are inviting Conference attendees to join us for a trip to beautiful and historic St. John's Presbyterian Church, Belfast, where some of the Island's top musical talent will be on display in a Songwriters' Circle, offered as part of the award-winning Festival of Small Halls. A short stop at a very special Montgomery site, Macphail House and Woods in Orwell, will be included. For more information, and to register, clickhere.

On the afternoon of Sunday, June 24, a beloved post-Conference tradition returns, as we embark on the "Montgomery Road Trip" to popular Montgomery sites on PEI's gorgeous North Shore, culminating with readings from some of the Island's best-loved poets at Montgomery's "hallowed ground", the Macneill Homestead site. For more information, and to register, clickhere.

Registrants are also reminded that you will need to purchase an extra ticket if you wish to bring a guest to the Banquet.

4. Accommodations and Transportation
The Conference is pleased to partner with UPEI Conference Services in offering on-campus accommodations to attendees at a preferred nightly rate: click here for more information.
Information on other local accommodation options is available here.

Free parking is available in UPEI Lot A and the lower part of Lot B (see campus map).

Route #1 for Charlottetown city buses provides regular service to the UPEI campus on weekdays and Saturdays; the bus company, T3 Trius Transit, is very kindly offering a discounted $1 fare to anyone who shows their Conference name tag (the "February 2012 Pilot Schedule",available online, is still in effect).

L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory

(Overview from the Call for Proposals: Please note that submissions are now closed)

University of Prince Edward Island, 21–24 June 2012

“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.” — The Golden Road (1913)

“and even if you are not Abegweit-born you will say, ‘Why … I have come home!’” — “Prince Edward Island” (1939)

For the tenth biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, we invite scholars, writers, readers, and cultural producers of all kinds to consider the topic of L.M. Montgomery and cultural memory. A term that originated in the field of archaeology and that now resonates in a wide range of disciplines, cultural memory refers to the politics of remembering and forgetting, sometimes in opposition to official versions of the past and the present. Within textual studies, the term invites us to consider the ways in which the past, the present, and the future are remembered, recorded, and anticipated by members of a collective and encoded into text. As a result, cultural memory touches on a number of key concerns, including identity, belonging, citizenship, home, community, place, custom, religion, language, landscape, and the recovery and preservation of cultural ancestries.

But what versions of Prince Edward Island, of Canada, of the world do Montgomery’s work and its derivatives encourage readers to remember? How do gender and genre (not to mention religion and power) affect and shape Montgomery’s selective and strategic ways of remembering in her fiction and life writing? What acts of memory can be found in the depiction of writers, diarists, letter writers, oral storytellers, poets, and domestic artists in her fiction? What roles do domesticity, nature, conflict, and war play in the shaping and reshaping of cultural memory? To what extent do nostalgia and antimodernism drive Montgomery texts in print and on screen? How have these selective images of time and place been adapted to fit a range of reading publics all over the world?